State Budget Reveals Low Expectations

July 4, 1999|By DAVID NITKIN Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE — More than 100,000 motorists will dutifully deliver an extra $20 to Tallahassee this year in an effort to protect the threatened West Indian manatee, the gentle aquatic mammal whose depiction graces their specially purchased license plates.

The state will spend their cash and a lot more -- about $4 million in all -- cataloguing, researching, tracking and keeping deadly powerboats away from the endangered creatures.

What will concerned residents get for their effort? They might be surprised at the official state goal: two fewer dead manatees.

"Manatees go all over, and we can't go all over," said David Arnold, bureau chief of the state's Protected Species Management program, which reported 231 manatee deaths in 1998. "We can only regulate certain areas where manatees go on a regular basis. The feeling was that any number we picked was really just a guess."

Guessing has become the order of the day in the convoluted world of Florida's state budget, which is filled with more bizarre, outlandish and just plain curious numbers than ever, thanks to a 5-year-old budget reform effort that critics say has failed to deliver on its promises.

Consider these examples:

The goal of the Water Facilities Division is to keep 90 percent of Florida's drinking water systems free from contamination, meaning the state will meet its target if 690 water plants become tainted during the next 12 months.

The Department of Revenue will consider itself successful if parents skip payments in as many as 49 percent of the child-support cases it is tracking. That would mean as many as 409,150 deadbeat parents.

The Bureau of Library Development will spend $49.3 million on books, magazines, computers, staffing and construction in the next year. It will consider the money well-spent if it tallies a 2 percent increase in use at the state's libraries.

The questionable numbers are sprinkled throughout the state's $49 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that began on Thursday.They are part of Florida's latest attempt at budget reform, an idea known as performance-based budgeting that has been the law since 1994.

Harsh reality

It's supposed to work like this: Legislators and bureaucrats try to determine what taxpayer money should be buying within a particular agency. At the end of the year, they decide whether the agency has met its goals. If it did, it might be rewarded with more money the following year. If not, it might get punished with a budget cut.

That's what it says in textbooks and seminar handouts. But the reality is far different. Despite years of hand-wringing by state workers to concoct numbers that make sense, "We don't do performance-based budgeting," said Donna Arduin, Gov. Jeb Bush's director of planning and budgeting and a former deputy budget chief for New York state.

"I was shocked when I got here, as was the governor," Arduin said. "Many of [the numbers] don't measure the things we would like to be measuring. And we don't tie them to the budget. So we don't do performance-based budgeting."

Arduin's views are at odds with key legislative leaders who champion the reform effort and want to give it more time to work.

In Florida, the governor proposes a budget, but final decisions are made by the Legislature, with the governor wielding a line-item veto.

"You are talking about a cultural change here," said Rep. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, head of the House budget-writing committee. "We're in it for the long haul, regardless of what the buzzword is on it. You are going to see this type of budget direction from here on out. It is here to stay."

Still, Pruitt concedes that legislators have never rewarded an agency for meeting its target or punished one for falling short -- consequences that are supposed to be an integral part of the system.

"If you focus only on the numbers, then that is wrong," Pruitt said. "For those of us who are looking at the big picture, that has always been our focus."

This is more than a dispute between ink-stained numbers-crunchers holed up in a dim warren in the Capitol. Hanging in the balance is how much taxpayers send to Tallahassee and what the state does with its billions.

Any financial expert will tell you that a good budget is more than a collection of figures: It's a planning tool to chart where a government or company is heading.

So Florida's future, in theory, should be contained in the 519-page document that legislators approved before adjourning on April 30.

But the state hops with abandon from one path to another, from year to year. Targets and goals are constantly moving.

Fickle performance

Consider the motor carrier program run by the Department of Transportation. Two years ago, the program developed its performance-based budgeting goals. One was for 42 percent of commercial vehicles to pass safety inspections by state workers.